We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Miracle Ogbuji a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Alright, Miracle thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. Do you manage your own social media?

Over the past two years, my social media pages (Instagram, TikTok and YouTube) have contributed to over 50% of my business income and I have managed these accounts all by myself.

I am a freelancer and I enjoy working for myself from the comfort of my home but maintaining these social media channels can be hectic and often make you less efficient. So currently, I’m working on building or hiring a team to lessen this burden. But till that happens, I’ll still be managing my pages.

Being the only one incharge of running your business and managing social media pages can be a stressful job and if you don’t have the capacity to hire a team, you’ll have no choice but to do it yourself. My advice is to and a way to plan your contents ahead of time, and if you can, batch produce the contents and share later.

Miracle, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?

Hi, My name is Miracle Ogbuji, I’m a Logo and brand identity designer. My major aim is to create long lasting identities for brands. A simple logo and a perfect identity can define your brand, and my aim is to achieve that for my clients.

I started graphics designing in early 2016 and I’m all self-taught. I’ve always loved the idea of art and creativity, I even at some point wanted to be a fine artist, but that didn’t turn out well until graphics designing caught my attention and I found a whole new passion.

It was back in 2016 while I was working at a cyber cafe as a typist that I came across a software called Adobe Photoshop and I was fascinated by what it could do, so I spent a long time researching it. After figuring it out, I made up my mind to learn this software and become a graphics designer. It wasn’t an easy thing for me because I was completely clueless at the time. For the next few weeks, I couldn’t learn any thing and I almost gave up. Then I met someone that was very good with this software and was a designer as well and after watching him work, I thought about asking him to be my tutor, which I did but he turned me down. This made me really sad but also motivated me, because if that guy can do it, then I most definitely can do it too.

I went back to my research till I came across a website that provided short tutorials on creating some simple designs on Adobe Photoshop, and I ended up spending all my nights over the next few months on that site. I recreated virtually every single tutorial I could find on that site over the next six months or more and when I felt like I had conquered the site, I shifted to YouTube and found tons of videos too. Every other thing I’ve learnt about my skill has been online and from personal experiences.

The first few years of my design journey was not really smooth as I didn’t really make so much money. But I wasn’t really concerned about that as all I wanted was just to make designs and I was just happy doing that. Fast forward to 2020, about four years later, I was more experienced and had worked with more clients and made some good money too, then I decided to select a niche in the graphics design industry and stick to it. This was when I decided to be a logo designer mainly.

I fell in love with logo designing amongst other areas of design because I love the idea of turning an idea that a brand has into something big and great that could potentially help push them forward. I love seeing the typefaces, monograms or logos I’ve created be something that a brand’s customer base could just easily relate with, something that differentiates them from others uniquely. So in 2020, I made the decision to design logos and just that. And it has been a fun ride till today.

One of the things I’m proud of as a logo designer is my work. I’m not the best designer out there but I make wonderful designs with a well thought out process. I create the logos from scratch, sketch out the ideas and take my time to finalize it. (If you visit my pages, you’ll see that). I believe one of the things that differentiates me from others is my design process, I have a process that doesn’t only ensure that the brand is well represented but that the target audience buy into the idea as well.

Logo designing (and graphics designing generally) has been a huge part of my life for a long time. It has given me purpose and been the major source of my income for a long time. And even if I wasn’t making any money from this, I would still be a designer because this is what I love and I’m genuinely passionate about.

Can you talk to us about how your side-hustle turned into something more.

As at the time I started designing, it was more like a hobby and a side hustle. I even at some point didn’t think I’ll make a career out of this, but I guess I do now.

One major milestone that changed a lot for me was when I quit my day job back in 2018. It was a normal minimum wage job that barely paid the bills. I was intent on working there for as long as I could until I felt stable enough to leave; that was the whole idea. But I had a bad boss that was rude and owed us a lot, so it quickly became a toxic work environment not just for me, but for my colleagues also. One fateful day, I got into an argument with my boss because he was owing me a month’s worth of salary and this led me to angrily resign. I got home and thought about what I would do and if I should just apologize and ask for my job back, but then I figured that going back would mean returning to the same toxicity I was experiencing, so I decided against that and tried applying for some other jobs elsewhere.

Applying for jobs didn’t really go well, but my graphics designing side hustle did well instead and in the space of a month, I made up to three times my previous salary. This greatly motivated me. So I stopped applying for jobs and instead pushed my design career so I could get more clients, a decision I would never regret.

How did you build your audience on social media?

I had a massive growth on my social media towards the end of 2021 and this was mainly because I started making short videos of my logo design process, which people seemed to like a lot. I started by posting these short 30-60 seconds videos on my instagram as reels and on TikTok, the first few videos didn’t really do great, till one picked up and the others followed. I figured out the kind of audience I was attracting and what they wanted and I capitalized on that and kept making videos to suit them.

After a while, I was getting a lot of comments asking about more long form and more detailed videos, so I started my YouTube channel, which has a more detailed information of my design processes. I’ve also made short tips and tricks videos based on some questions I’ve been asked.

If you’re starting to build your social media community, I would advice you to be consistent. Keep posting regularly, it may be hard, but don’t give up. Figure out the kind of people that follow you, find out what they like and make contents to suit that, if you’re confused about this, you can simply ask your audience, you can do a poll as well and get ideas from them. Lastly, don’t be scared to try something new or different, you never know what works till you’ve tried it out.

Contact Info:

• Instagram: https://instagram.com/classiqmims
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/@classiqmims
• Youtube: https://youtube.com/@classiqmims
• Other: https://tiktok.com/@classiqmims

Image Credits
ClassiqMims